“Natalie, this is more or less the face of Phobos, about half the size of our full Moon, that you would see if you were standing on Mars right now.”

Phobos looked like a diseased potato. Priest was staring at the picture, and its gray and black reflected in his eyes. “This is history, Natalie. Think about it: mine were among the first human eyes ever to see Phobos and Deimos, the moons of Mars. I wanted to show you this, kind of share it with you, the way I saw it.”

She was moved to touch him again, but she resisted the impulse. “Show me Mars, Ben.”

“Sure.”

After a few more minutes Priest had retrieved images of the surface of the planet itself. But the dust storm was still continuing. There was only one place away from the poles where any detail was visible: an area called Tharsis, close to the Martian equator. Here the pictures showed four dark, irregular spots, roughly circular, three in a line running at an angle to the equator, and the fourth a little way away to the west.

She asked, “What the hell can these be?”

“Who knows? I guess we’ll figure it out when the storm clears. The lab staffers are calling them ‘Carl’s Marks.’ After Sagan, see—”

The shapes in the images intrigued her; they were familiar, somehow. If only she could see just a little more… “You say this region’s called Tharsis. Do we know anything else about it?”

“Actually, yes. You’re the geologist, Natalie. You ought to know.”

“Just tell me, asshole.”

“There have been radar studies of Mars since the mid-sixties. This Tharsis region — which is just a bright splotch seen from Earth — looks as if it’s the highest plateau on the planet.”

“Really? How high?”

He shrugged. “Ten or twenty miles above the mean datum. We can’t say for sure. Mean datum — you understand there’s no ocean on Mars, so no convenient sea level to—”

“You must have some better-resolution images than these. It’s the only visible spot on the planet, for Christ’s sake. Somebody must have pointed the cameras again.”

Priest began to work the keyboard. He found a couple of images which showed her some more detail. She stared at the screen, pressing close to the glass.

“You’re telling me these features are stable? That they aren’t, uh, whirlwinds in the dust storm or somesuch?”

“No way. They’ve lasted since Mariner got to Mars, a couple of weeks ago. We’re undoubtedly looking at some kind of surface feature, here.”

She could see circular markings within each spot. And there was some kind of scalloping. They almost look like volcanic caldera. The mouths of volcanoes.

But why should these features, of all of Mars, be showing up at all? Because they’re in Tharsis. And Tharsis is the highest region on Mars. And why these particular features? Because they are the highest points in Tharsis — therefore the highest points on the planet…

“My God,” she whispered.

“Natalie? What is it?”

Those spots had to be volcanoes, sitting on top of some kind of vast shield system. Big enough to dwarf anything on Earth. Everest was only five miles high; those babies must be fifteen miles at least. So high they were poking above the dust storms; so high they were above the bulk of the atmosphere itself.

“Natalie? Are you okay?”

York couldn’t believe her eyes. She had Priest call up image after image.

At least, she reflected later, the mystery of the Martian geology had taken her mind off Priest.

After Fred Michaels hung up, Tim Josephson sat in his office, a glass of whiskey in his hand.

The decision was made.

He supposed he ought to be feeling triumph. Exultation. We’ve got what we wanted, by God. Another huge boondoggle, a program that ought to keep thousands of NASA employees gainfully employed for a decade or more.

But the truth was, he felt too beat-up to care.

He was having a little trouble focusing his eyes. He’d been chained to his desk and phone all day, working in support of Fred Michaels’s machinations. And there were still a hundred and one things to be finished up. But, he told himself, there was nothing that wouldn’t keep until the next day.

So he took his shoes off and got his feet up on his desk, and he started dictating into a pocket tape recorder.

The last few months had given Josephson, working as a close aide of Fred Michaels, a startling insight into the way major national decisions were made: at the highest level in the land, with at stake national prestige, tens of billions of dollars spread across many years, and hundreds of high-profile careers in politics, industry, the military. Someday he was going to write a book about all of it. Management in the Space Age, maybe.

The decision about America’s future in space had turned out to be extraordinarily painful.

It had been clear to Josephson from the beginning that Nixon wanted to spend as little as possible on space.

The fact was, Nixon — belying his image — had brought a pretty liberal domestic agenda to the White House; in the midst of a debilitating war, he wanted to free up money to pay for expanded social entitlement programs, and wage and price controls.

Space was one place that money could come from. But space was a tough lobby to fight.

So, soon after coming into office, Nixon had allowed Congress to reorganize the standing space committees out of existence, so that space was the purview of the Senate Commerce and House Science and Technology subcommittees. Losing its special interface to Congress, NASA was in danger of being emasculated, losing its heroic status, becoming just another spending department fighting for funds. To most people involved in the space program, even within NASA, such changes were all but invisible; but to an insider like Josephson — or Michaels — they were dramatic, a potent signifier of Nixon’s real determination to down-grade the profile of space.

But then the White House had come up against the aerospace industry.

Aerospace was ailing, as ever. In fact technological progress was making life even tougher. New systems were either not deployed at all or had short production runs: if it works, it’s obsolete Aerospace firms had to bet the farm every time they accepted a contract.

But obviously the government needed a healthy aerospace industry. So ways had to be found to feed the industry in slack times: to spread wealth, and to subsidize research. The civilian space program was perfect for that purpose. It always had been.

So, from the start of 1971, Fred Michaels had started to put it about that the aerospace industry might not be able to survive another year of diminished space work; he spoke particularly to congressmen from states like California, Texas, and Florida, where aerospace depression was an acute electoral issue. And he quietly encouraged the contractors contributing to the various program studies to talk up their estimates of the employment the various options would stimulate. It was all designed to keep the pressure on the White House. Nineteen seventy-two is an election year. We need a space program to keep the aerospace guys in work… But what’s that program going to he?

Josephson was mildly shocked at how quickly the scientific and exploratory aspects of spaceflight were discarded as factors in shaping the new program. Nobody with any clout cared about going to Mars, or anywhere else, for the science. And nobody argued — he was more surprised to observe — on the basis of the benefits of space spin-offs. After all, if you wanted the spin-offs, why go into space at all? Why not turn the R D money and NASA’s fabled management skills directly to other, more worthy, programs?

Those were hard questions to answer. So Michaels, bluntly, avoided them.